I wanted to go back to a Washington Post piece from last September 14th by veteran Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who more or less represents Washington centrism. I think it’s kind of revealing about some of the reasons of rhetorical momentum why the globalist establishment can’t restrain its drift toward extremism on Open Borders:

Angela Merkel is a better leader for America than Donald Trump

By Richard Cohen Opinion writer September 14, 2015

It has come to this: The leading Republican presidential candidate struts like a martinet and has taken on the persona, if not the rhetoric, of a hater, while the leader of Germany, an altogether humble woman of clear moral vision, is performing in the Western tradition of enlightened tolerance. How did we lose this war?...

You can imagine — or can you? — what the world would be like if German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked like Trump. Instead of leading her country in a righteous humanitarian cause, instead of assuring Germans that they really have the wherewithal to take in anywhere from 800,000 to 1 million migrants, what if she had seized the political opening? What if she denounced the migrants as rapists and criminals — concluding, of course, with the oily lie that, as harsh it may sound, it is the truth?

Or maybe Merkel would promise to build a wall — as impregnable as the one Trump promises for Mexico — across Germany’s eastern borders. Look, she could say, it has been done — a wall down the middle of Berlin, separating east from west, and it worked. …

At bottom, the difference between the leading Republican candidate and the leading German is an appreciation of history. Merkel knows that the new Europe skates on the thinnest of ice. She knows that Europe is awful at dealing with minorities. She knows that ethnic peace has been achieved by ethnic cleansing and population transfers that the Nazis and the Soviets initiated and the World War II victors continued. Winston Churchill had it about right when he told the House of Commons in 1944 that “expulsion is the method which, insofar as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. . . . A clean sweep will be made.”

That clean sweep is now being unmade. France is anywhere from 8 to 10 percent Muslim; for Austria, Belgium and Germany, the figure is upward of 5 percent. In France, the large numbers of Muslims (and black Africans) live in the banlieues, suburban slums where radicalism and crime fester. Germany has a substantial Turkish community. With more Muslims on the way, the ethnic equilibrium of Europe will be tested. Some politicians will no doubt take advantage. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, is building a fence topped with razor wire in an effort “to keep Europe Christian.” As any forlorn village priest can attest, it is far too late for that.

Merkel understands what Trump does not: that to pander to prejudice is to reap the whirlwind. His scapegoating of immigrants is playing with fire. We are a tolerant nation, but our better angels have sometimes flown the coop. We incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II, locked our doors to desperate European Jews running from Hitler, enslaved black people and held them in peonage, and nearly eradicated the Native Americans. Unlike Germany, which unflinchingly stares at a history both repellent and frightening, for the longest time we either shamelessly ignored our history or rewrote it to conform to myth. On an airplane recently, I watched a bit of “Gone With the Wind.” Its depiction of slavery made me retch.

Donald Trump is rebuked by Angela Merkel. She has the political gravitas that he lacks and the respect for history that he disdains. It has indeed come to this: A German leader is showing American politicians how to be an American.

Okay, well, obviously Cohen was motivated by the common It’s Always 1933 in Europe fetish, but I want to focus on Cohen’s focus upon the winners’ actions in 1944-1946 to remake the map of Eastern Europe: the ethnic cleansing of about 12 million of the German losers from Eastern Europe:

She knows that Europe is awful at dealing with minorities. She knows that ethnic peace has been achieved by ethnic cleansing and population transfers that the Nazis and the Soviets initiated and the World War II victors continued. Winston Churchill had it about right when he told the House of Commons in 1944 that “expulsion is the method which, insofar as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. . . . A clean sweep will be made.”

That clean sweep is now being unmade. France is anywhere from 8 to 10 percent Muslim; for Austria, Belgium and Germany, the figure is upward of 5 percent.

Inviting in million of Muslims into northern Europe will right the wrongs committed by Europeans against each other 70 years ago in the formation of contemporary Poland, that repulsively non-diverse country. You see, to not want to invite in Muslims is not only to endorse Hitler, but also to endorse Stalin.

Or something like that.

There seems to be a growing urge among Establishment voices to demonize as immoral the desire to let sleeping dogs lie.

For example, the ethnic cleansing of Germans at the end of World War II is one of the sleepiest sleeping dogs of them all.

If you asked me, I’d say, Well, throwing all the Germans out of Poland and moving the Polish border 200 miles into Germany was bad, and I’m against it being done back then and all that, but, holy cow, let’s not get into that now. What’s done is done and Eastern Europe is settled.

But that kind of prudence is increasingly out of fashion.

Maybe we should call it the Inglourious Basterdization of elite opinion: the urge is growing to go back into the past and Kill Hitler (and, okay, to be fair about it, Stalin, too). Granted, advances in time machine technology haven’t been wholly satisfactory yet, so therefore we should give anybody who shows up claiming to have some analogy to being like Jews in Hitler’s Europe, well, we should give them Europe … even if they are anti-Semites who would consider it disgusting to claim to be kind of like Jews.

Because Hitler.

By the way, I know race does not exist genetically and all that because race is a social construction, but the socially constructed current border between Poland and German is a racial/genetic border, too, because race can be socially constructed if you have enough T-34s.

Hum Genet. 2005 Sep;117(5):428-43. Epub 2005 Jun 16.

Significant genetic differentiation between Poland and Germany follows present-day political borders, as revealed by Y-chromosome analysis.

Abstract To test for human population substructure and to investigate human population history we have analysed Y-chromosome diversity using seven microsatellites (Y-STRs) and ten binary markers (Y-SNPs) in samples from eight regionally distributed populations from Poland (n = 913) and 11 from Germany (n = 1,215). Based on data from both Y-chromosome marker systems, which we found to be highly correlated (r = 0.96), and using spatial analysis of the molecular variance (SAMOVA), we revealed statistically significant support for two groups of populations: (1) all Polish populations and (2) all German populations. By means of analysis of the molecular variance (AMOVA) we observed a large and statistically significant proportion of 14% (for Y-SNPs) and 15% (for Y-STRs) of the respective total genetic variation being explained between both countries. The same population differentiation was detected using Monmonier’s algorithm, with a resulting genetic border between Poland and Germany that closely resembles the course of the political border between both countries. The observed genetic differentiation was mainly, but not exclusively, due to the frequency distribution of two Y-SNP haplogroups and their associated Y-STR haplotypes: R1a1*, most frequent in Poland, and R1*(xR1a1), most frequent in Germany. We suggest here that the pronounced population differentiation between the two geographically neighbouring countries, Poland and Germany, is the consequence of very recent events in human population history, namely the forced human resettlement of many millions of Germans and Poles during and, especially, shortly after World War II. …